A small area at the southern tip of Africa houses an extraordinarily rich and unusual variety of plants. It has several types of vegetation, of which the fynbos (a species-rich scrubland of southwestern South Africa) contributes the most species. Of roughly 8,500 species, 36 have become extinct in the past century, and another 618 species are threatened. (In the field of conservation, the term threatened has a specific, technical meaning. It comes from the World Conservation Union’s [IUCN’s] Red Lists, the lists of species that are at risk of extinction. A species listed as “threatened” has a high probability of extinction in the wild within the next few decades if nothing is done to prevent it.) For the fynbos, invading alien plants—particularly various species of Australian wattle trees (acacia)—and the conversion of natural areas to agriculture are the two major causes of species extinction and endangerment.

Terrestrial ecosystems are far from being the only places where recent extinctions have occurred. The Mississippi and St. Lawrence river basins were home to 297 North American species of the bivalve mollusk families Unionidae and Margaritiferidae. Of these, 21 have become extinct in the past century, and another 120 species are in danger of extinction. During this same period, engineers have extensively dammed and channeled North America’s rivers. The Tennessee River, for example, is dammed along its entire length from Knoxville, Tenn., until it joins the Ohio River. Changing flowing rivers to effectively static reservoirs completely changes the habitats of the species that live in them. In addition, poor farming practices have greatly increased nutrient and pesticide runoff from croplands, and sewage effluent and runoff from cities have exacerbated the problem. Freshwater bivalves are sessile filter feeders (seefilter feeding) and very sensitive to changes in water quality.

Many of these bivalve species in their juvenile stages parasitize freshwater fish and so are dependent on their survival as well. Some freshwater bivalves are harvested for the cultured pearl trade. And, as if these were not sufficient threats, two introduced species, the Asian clam (Corbicula fluminea) and the zebramussel (Dreissena polymorpha), have rapidly expanded their North American ranges, outcompeting native species.

Some of the changes to North America’s rivers that threaten their native bivalves have also seriously harmed the continent’s freshwater fish. Of the approximately 950 species of freshwater fish of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, about 40 have become extinct in the past century. They have disappeared from a wide range of habitats—northern lakes, southern streams, wetlands, and particularly springs. Springs are often small, isolated habitats, which favour the evolution of unique species, but those features make the habitats extremely vulnerable to human disturbance. Introduced species—from the stocking of fish and frogs for food and of fish for sport and from accidental aquarium releases—are also factors in 18 of the 40 extinctions. The introduced species can outcompete native fish, sometimes feed on them, and in some cases hybridize with them. Hybridization may seem a surprising cause of extinction. Populations that have evolved in isolation, however, may no longer retain their morphologic and genetic distinctiveness when mixed with similar species from elsewhere.

The southeastern United States holds a little over half of North America’s fish, many of which have small geographic ranges, living in one or just a few rivers. Extensive damming and pollution of southern Appalachian mountain streams have exterminated 4 species and threatened another 80.

Australian mammals

At least 60 mammals have become extinct worldwide in the past two centuries, about a third of them from Caribbean islands. Of the remainder, 18 mammals were native to Australia, where they constituted about 6 percent of the terrestrial animal species prior to the British colonization of the continent beginning in the late 18th century. (Aboriginal peoples reached Australia at least 42,000 years earlier and, like the Polynesians across the eastern Pacific, eliminated many native species.) More than 40 other living mammal species in Australia have lost at least half their former ranges, and some survive only on protected offshore islands.

Some of the extinctions have taken place in what is now the wheat belt of the southern tip of Western Australia, which retains only 5 percent of its natural woodland vegetation cover. Others have occurred in the southern arid zone, an area of mostly desert dominated by spinifex grass—and very few people. Nonetheless, this is an area where domestic grazing animals have destroyed the natural vegetation and caused extensive soil erosion. Moreover, European rabbits (Oryctolagus cuniculus) introduced in the mid-19th century are competitors of the native mammals, and the redfox (Vulpes vulpes) introduced about the same time has likely destroyed native small-mammal populations even in remote areas. Where foxes are absent in Australia or where their numbers have been controlled, the native mammals seem to have fared better. In addition, farmers and graziers have greatly altered the natural fire regimes—the roles that fire plays in ecosystems in the absence of human intervention—with consequent changes to the vegetation and the animals that depend on it.

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